Instead of a knowledge base, companies should be investing in a collaborative content hub that looks like this:

It includes the following capabilities:

Easy content capture. You should be able to flag information from any source (email, discussion forum thread, social media interaction) and kick it off to be included in your collaborative content hub.

Democracy. Everyone within an organization, and customers as well, should be able to recommend information to be included in the content hub.

Flexible authoring environment. You must be able to create and publish content without arduous workflows. Not all content should be subjected to the same workflows. Some content must be able to be published instantly, for example a service alert. Other content should be able to be routed through review or legal compliance flows.

Social content: Anyone who comes into contact with content should be able to rate and comment on content.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the 15th annual Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. I have attended DEFCON in the past, but never Black Hat. The conference has grown significantly each year, and judging by the size of the expo floor, the vendors understand its significance. I enjoyed the conference and had great conversations with practitioners and vendors alike. Here are some observations from two of the sessions that I attended:

In July, I wrote a report entitled Huawei Takes On The Global Enterprise Market, which outlined Huawei’s ambitious targets to diversify into the global enterprise market. This morning (August 1), Lenovo announced a strategic partnership with EMC in Beijing which shows that it has similar ambitions to broaden beyond its current base of business into the global enterprise market. There are three key components of the partnership:

Joint server development. Lenovo and EMC will form a server technology development program to develop X86 server products. Lenovo will ship these servers (likely Lenovo’s ThinkServer brand, announced in June 2012) to the global enterprise market. As a next step, EMC will integrate Lenovo server products into its existing storage product line and offer them to its global customers.

Lenovo will OEM and resell EMC storage products. Lenovo will OEM and resell EMC storage products as part of its enterprise product portfolio. Sales will start in the mainland China market and gradually extend out to the global market as part of Lenovo’s enterprise vision.

A joint venture for NAS products. EMC’s Iomega division will be put into the new joint venture, of which Lenovo owns 51% and EMC the remaining 49%. The JV will produce NAS products targeting SMBs and branch offices for large enterprises.